"소리의 빛" ("Light of Sound") Listening Session for PlayWrite
By 손열음 (Yeol Eum Son)
Phil Roasting House 4th Floor Listening Room
Gwangju
Nov. 7, 2026 (recurring every other Saturday at 10 a.m.)
(Jisu Sheen recently moved from New Haven to Gwangju, South Korea, where she’s covering local arts and culture for the New Haven Independent and Midbrow.)
I emerged from a long sleep Saturday morning to listen to an album of piano music in the upper floor of a cafe in Gwangju's North District. When the album ended, the listeners headed downstairs to fill our divergent roles; the cafe owner descended to make the coffee, and the rest of us followed to drink it.
강졍필 (Kang Kyung Pil), who runs Phil Roasting House, started roasting and serving specialty coffee at his second-floor spot in May of 2022. The fourth-floor listening room came a year and a half later. Now, Kang holds album listening sessions there every other Saturday morning, in a free series he calls "소리의 빛," or "Light of Sound."
Over a pair of high-fidelity Spendor BC3 speakers, Korean pianist 손열음 (Yeol Eum Son) played an arrangement by Alexis Weissenberg of Charles Trenet's song "En Avril à Paris." Lilting melodies, with the romance of a spring day, set the scene. The lyrics of the original chanson begin:
Quand Paris s'éveille au mois d'avril...
(When Paris awakens in April...)
I often wonder about people with running monologues in their heads, a feature I never had. Sometimes I complain that these folks have a leg up when it comes to penning articles like these. Can't they just copy down what's playing off the dome, for free? I can come up with words, but it takes effort.
Sitting in the listening room, I had a rare moment of appreciation for my muted inner world: more empty space to fill with hi-fi music. Perhaps somewhere in that room, my wordless thoughts were mixing with the sound.
Piano notes streamed out of the room's speakers, which were elevated on short wooden stools. Son was reaching levels of intensity that spoke to the extremes of nature's splendor and the human ability to notice it. Like Paris in April, I was also waking up—first with music, and then with coffee.
The CD we were listening to, Son's latest album PlayWrite, isn't set to release worldwide until 2027. It made an early release in September in Korea, where audiophiles welcomed Son's cross-genre tastes. Her repertoire for the album consists of 20th century composers, with jazz and folk alongside Baroque.
After the music ended, I felt like I could even hear a new grain in the silence that followed. I walked to the stairwell, where I could see mountains and the Kia Champions Field baseball stadium. Two floors below, house-roasted coffee awaited.
Kang found a way to make his fascinations a part of his regular life. He told me about a time when he was sick with COVID-19. He had to close the cafe temporarily while he recovered. In the haze of his illness, he was gripped with a vision—a real, on-screen one, that is, of an internet listing for an excellent deal on a set of speakers. He spent his days looking at the listing over and over.
He went for it, and now his coffee-drinking clientele reaps the benefits.
"They were heavy," he recalled in Korean about the speakers' journey to the fourth floor. He started using the gear to listen to music alone and with friends. Once a month, he opened the listening room to strangers, adding welcoming remarks and introductions.
In my coffee cup, a reflection of the wooden slats above rippled into place. A blue flame boiled the water that would make the next cup. Shadows of trees poured through the windows to dance over the cafe's chairs. The coffee was strong and complex.
Kang's now-biweekly Saturday morning sessions came from a quirk of his coffee routine. The cafe opens mid-morning at 11 a.m., and Kang got used to coming in earlier to roast the coffee beans for his customers. Saturday mornings were typically free of deliveries, but he would still come at his normal time. Instead of roasting beans, he spent the time listening to music.
Then he thought, "Should I open this to the public? If we listen together, it might be nice."
Sometimes, Kang said, coming from the fourth floor to the second is like returning from a "different world." There are customers to attend to, and coffee to brew, but he's still a bit dazed from the music. The ins and outs of selecting blends, chatting with regulars, and accepting money—it seems to all kick in somewhere in the two floors between one world and the next.
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